Andrew James Martins, PhD

The Martins lab focuses on understanding human immunology through the lens of systems biology. We aim to enable a deeper analysis of clinical samples by adapting single cell -omics technologies to be feasible across studies with variable sample types, sizes, and with large sample numbers.

We expect that assessment of individual cell states across a wide range of clinical studies will lead to:

1. Comprehensive catalogues of cell states and their association with healthy or diseased donor/patient outcomes
2. New therapeutic interventions that target cell subset specific phenotypes to fine-tune immune behavior
3. Insights into the role of cell state heterogeneity (the variability in cell states in a population of cells) to immune responses.

In addition, we seek to add new methods to assess and mechanistically interrogate single cell behaviors in human samples through dynamic imaging assays and tissue-mimicking culture conditions. Lab projects typically will combine wet bench and computational components and involve collaboration between lab members and with other labs.

Examples of available projects:

• Modification of existing single cell analysis methods to be cheaper and more scalable, to enable application to a wider range of clinical studies.
• Utilizing existing single cell data to generate refined, interpretable cell subset specific gene sets
• In vitro modeling of immune responses and dynamic cell phenotype tracking with in-culture microscopy